I just finished watching Tron Legacy. I’ve never watched the original movie but since it has been touted as one of the all time science fiction favourites I decided to pick up the new instalment (I missed it when it came out on theatres). The movie was a special effects extravaganza which made me wonder what the old movie was like. Lo and behold You Tube did manage to churn out a trailer for the original. This made me think, how many movies are out there that have the computer central to the storyline. Names like the matrix, the net, the entire Space Odyssey series, Cloak & Dagger, Die Hard 4.0 come to mind. And those are just the tip of the iceberg. Creating a list is a task for some other time. For now, the computer definitely has changed our lives and it is only right that it has claimed a proportionate chunk of the silver screen as well.

What is peculiar though is that most of the computer operating systems you see in movies never look anything like what people use in their daily lives. These are called MOS (Movie Operating Systems). Yes that’s right someone actually coined the term for that operating system that doesn’t require anything else but a password to log on. They also exhibit interesting properties such as one key delete commands that irrevocably crash entire systems. I remember there was an e-mailer floating around with operating systems in the movies. A little searching and I came across this interesting compilation.